Happy birthday M

Happy Birthday Marli. I find it hard sometimes to believe you are now seventeen. I wonder what you would have looked like if you had actually lived. The closest reference I have is of course Elle, who is beautiful and broody and secretive. Someone who sometimes opens up to me and even at times reacts to me like I would hope you would have if you were alive.

I think I would have been a good mother, actually. Now, maybe not then. Or perhaps then. I don't know.

But now, I know I would be a good mother. I don't know how I'd cope. I would probably find someone else to be my partner in life for something like this, or go it alone. But not who I am with. Not her. She can't handle it, I don't think, not in the larger sense.

But I digress. This post is about you. Or the you that would have been.

You would have been almost on your way to college now. At the age I was a little before you were made. Unsure, excited, impatient about what life is really going to be like for you and you alone, away from your parents and the other people who have been with you all your life.

I wish you all the very best. Know that you are loved and remembered and missed by me. Know that I know you are beautiful. Know that I can still recall the feeling of you kicking inside my belly, making it hard to breathe. That I spoke to you, that you were my only friend who shared the secret of you for many months. That you were the one who actually gave me the strength to go through things on the outside with you in me. That long bike ride. The ride on the bus to places I've never been. That long, long night in our bed and the frightening episode at the hospital.

I love you.